Introducing Syphon

Syphon is an open source Mac OS X technology that allows applications to share frames - full frame rate video or stills - with one another in realtime. Now you can leverage the expressive power of a plethora of tools to mix, mash, edit, sample, texture-map, synthesize, and present your imagery using the best tool for each part of the job. Syphon gives you flexibility to break out of single-app solutions and mix creative applications to suit your needs.

Features

Syphon provides an ecosystem for sharing imagery between applications and new media development environments. Syphon is designed to be efficient and will not duplicate resources unnecessarily, keeping your frame rate and best interests in mind.

Hardware acceleration on the GPU - Servers and Clients share video on the graphics card - where it belongs, allowing for HD or larger video at 60 FPS

You can mix these tools and more to find unique solutions to your creative problems.

Developer SDK

Syphon.framework allows 3rd party developers to leverage frame-sharing in their applications or plugins. A simple Objective-C interface allows the publishing and acquisition of frames in very few lines of code. Under the hood, Syphon uses the power of IOSurface plus a selection of Cocoa and Core Foundation technologies to manage the communication between servers and clients. (download, documentation)

Proudly Sponsored By

Syphon is designed for and by new media technologists, realtime video artists and visualists. It is a labor of love, developed in the spare time of the authors. It is open, free and a gift to the new media community. If Syphon is useful to you or an application you are developing, please consider contributing or sponsoring to help continue development and support the cause.

Contact and Support

Some common questions are answered in our FAQ. You can contact us via our Syphon forum, which has sections for both users and developers.